Angular Universal Express Firebase

A packaged Cloud Function to serve Angular Universal apps.

Install

npm i angular-universal-express-firebase

NB: Run this command afer initialzing functions and from within the functions folder

Basic Usage

const angularUniversal = require('angular-universal-express-firebase');
exports.trigger = angularUniversal.trigger({
  index: 'path/to/index.html',
  main: 'path/to/bundle.longhash',
  enableProdMode: true,
  cdnCacheExpiry: 600,
  browserCacheExpiry: 300,
  staleWhileRevalidate: 120
});

TypeScript usage

import * as angularUniversal from 'angular-universal-express-firebase';
export let trigger = angularUniversal.trigger({
  index: 'path/to/index.html',
  main: 'path/to/bundle.longhash',
  enableProdMode: true,
  cdnCacheExpiry: 600,
  browserCacheExpiry: 300,
  staleWhileRevalidate: 120  
});

Setup

There are two parts to an Angular Universal app: the server build and the server.

Server Build

The current RC version of the Angular CLI covers the server build. Follow these steps to setup the CLI to get a server build.

Cloud Functions as the server

Build both browser and server Angular builds

You may want to use the --output-hashing none flag with your universal build to avoid needing to change the hash with each build in your function.js. At this point you should have two app entries in your angularcli.json file: browser and server. The browser build writes to the dist folder and the server build writes to the dist-server folder.

Delete dist/index.html.

This index file is uneeded because Angular Universal uses the assets in dist-server to generate the initial HTML.

Install the Firebase CLI.

# npm 
npm i firebase-tools -g
# yarn 
yarn add firebase-tools --global

Initialize Firebase Hosting and Cloud Functions.

firebase init hosting
# specify the public directory to dist 
firebase init functions
# this will create a functions folder  
# with and index.js, package.json, and set 
# of node_modules 

Open functions/index.js and add the following code.

const angularUniversal = require('angular-universal-express-firebase');
exports.trigger = angularUniversal.trigger({
  index: __dirname + 'dist-server/index.html',
  // make sure this points at the correct hash, or use the --output-hashing none flag on your ng build.
  main: __dirname + '/bundle.<generated-hash>',
  enableProdMode: true,
  cdnCacheExpiry: 600, // cache in the CDN for 10 minutes
  browserCacheExpiry: 300, // cache in the browser for 5 minutes
  staleWhileRevalidate: 120 // serve a stale version for 2 minutes after cdnCacheExpiry, but refresh CDN in background
});

Setup the rewrite in firebase.json

Firebase Hosting needs to know which Cloud Function to call.

{
  "hosting": {
    "rewrites": [
      {
        "source": "**",
        "function": "trigger"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Serve locally to test

The Firebase CLI allows you to serve locally and emulate the production environment.

firebase serve --only functions,hosting
# visit locahost:5000 

Deploy

Now that it looks great locally, deploy to production.

firebase deploy
firebase open hosting:site 
# automatically opens default browser to the prod site